Black Ops servers will cost PC players

Call of Duty: Black Ops players on the PC will have dedicated servers to play on, but apparently Activision has ripped a page out of the Electronic Arts playbook and has moved to a server provider model, which will see GameServers.com as the exclusive provider of servers (both ranked and unranked) for Black Ops.

The news hit today that GameServers.com is already starting to take pre-orders for servers both ranked and unranked. In the U.S. players will be able to get a ranked Black Ops server for $14.95 per month or an unranked Black Ops server for .99 cents per slot with a 24-slot max.

The company is offering locations in Canada, Europe, Japan and Australia, so it would appear that they have a number of locations from which to serve up the Black Ops action for PC players. The announcement of the dedicated server provider program for Black Ops now could cast into doubt the possibility of public release of the server files to the general public.

Currently, no additional details have been released, but our sources tell us that with the prices that GameServers.com is charging, no one is getting rich on this offering. As another competing provider that we spoke with told us, “The cost of the servers and the bandwidth is, of course, high to run these types of FPS gaming servers; and at the pricing they are charging it is difficult to see how they are going to make much money offering it.”

Treyarch has claimed that the decision to go with an exclusive provider gives the company better control to deal with cheaters and offers better security. The rental servers will all offer those that purchase them the ability to kick, ban and configure a number of the settings. Ranked servers will have a set configuration that customers will be unable to modify.